robertsguenther

i admire mira nair's films. she clearly loves India and its culture, a fact evident in all of her films i've had the pleasure of seeing. but her real art is showing her passion through so many prisms. vanity fair showed us India from the British home perspective which we usually see from western directors, while salaam bombay showed us modern urban India at its most destitute and triumphant. monsoon wedding introduces to the rapidly expanding Indian middle class, providing us with a far more intimate appreciation of her subjects than we might get calling for tech support for our computers or trying to understand a credit card bill.

kama sutra shows us India through yet another prism. first a prism of history, which she lushly recreates, and then through a prism of sexuality, which she (rightly) brandishes as legacy of a great and ancient culture. perhaps she suggests that the British morality imposed by the empire attempted, with some success, to obscure a vibrant and enthusiastic sexuality. well, if British sex is anything like British food, and Indian sex is like Indian food, she might have a point. curiously, i've been told that if you want to eat good English food in London, go curry.

i don't think that nair's ultimately interested in instructing us on sexual physics, or in telling us an epic melodrama. but through her four characters, she reveals love and sex as they are manifest continuously through the human story. a king imposes himself on his queen (patriarchy and rape), a king demands his coutesan (adultery and carnality), unrequited love (every character, each with a twist), jealousy, shame, sex as love, sex as passion, sex as brutality, and so on. the shades of sex that she reveals through her characters' relations are familiar, and she artfully sketches the nuances in three dimensions, where you rarely see more than one or two in Hollywood tripe. yet, like a good tikka masala, the chicken is familiar, but the colors and the flavor are distinctly and marvelously Indian.

This film is the Coen brothers' homage to the great noir thrillers of the golden age. Cheating spouses, feckless private dicks, mistaken identities, a bundle of dirty cash are rendered to their bare essence in the mess of rotting fish sitting on Marty's desk. The film is notable as much for the audacity of the Coen brothers in getting it made as it is for its success in turning the broad, open expanses of west texas into a claustrophobia unknown even to Saddam in his spider hole. It appears the Coens made five minutes of the film to show to investors, though they had absolutely no idea what the rest of the film would look like. They basically sold the mood of the film, and their efforts bore fruit. The film established the Coen brothers as a creative force and Frances McDormand as a rising art house star whose journey would eventually garner Oscar for the Coens' "Fargo." I rate it highly for visual appeal, intelligent story and good sheer suspense and terror.

This movie is not profound, but it is a lot of fun, especially if you have spent anytime in Europe for anything other than a 10-day holiday. Summer trekkers, studiers abroad, or anyone else who views the world and its myriad folk with curiosity and wonder, all qualify to savor the fun.

The conceit is basic: confronted with a life in a bureaucratic grind which promises material success but at the cost of a strangulating conformity, young man opts for the less certain but far more rewarding life of exploring the world, acquiring different treasure - people and experiences. In the film, a young frenchman seeking to find a comfortable career is advised to study economics and spanish, and winds up in a polyglot, polysexual, and very crowded student lair in Barcelona. His experiences in the city and the people he meets in the process alter the course of his life. Nothing new here.

But the movie is a romp, told with the sentimental exuberance of someone who has lived a similar experience. I liked the hints of memory that liven the film, like his walking into the street and the noises he hears, and the fast-forward as he walks down the street. These are memories, where the mundane is diminished and the interesting is enhanced. But for our hero, and for many as well who seek out all the wonderful stimulation this world has to offer, the memories are sweet (sometimes bittersweet), and worth retelling because he feels the lesson he learned - that life is too short to waste doing useless things with uninteresting people just for material gain - is so valuable he cares to share it.

I have never been to Barcelona, but the movie renders the city as the colorful, busy and exciting place everyone says it is. The movie Barcelona (of Whit Stillman's sadly meagre oeuvre) likewise paints a lovely and vibrant portrait of the city. I hope to visit it soon.

And in this day and age, when American relations with so many of its historic European allies reflect contempt instead of brotherhood, programs such as Erasmus offer a tremendous intangible benefit. This is, of course, the knowledge that people, no matter from what part of the globe they emerge, have far more in common than opposition. And though a little trite, the image of a houseful of students separated by language and culture (not that far, actually) living, fighting and ultimately coping is refreshing. Made me smile.